Fleeing repression, Jewish immigrants found success in Gold Rush SF

A portrait of founder Levi Strauss hangs on the door of the safe in the archive area of Levi Strauss & Co. headquarters in San Francisco.

A portrait of founder Levi Strauss hangs on the door of the safe in the archive area of Levi Strauss & Co. headquarters in San Francisco.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Image 2 of 3

An early example of the Two Horse trademark that Levi Strauss & Co. created in 1886.

An early example of the Two Horse trademark that Levi Strauss & Co. created in 1886.

Photo: Levi's

Image 3 of 3

Levi Strauss, founder of the clothing company that bears his name, was among the German-speaking Jewish immigrants from Central Europe who found success in Gold Rush-era San Francisco.

Levi Strauss, founder of the clothing company that bears his name, was among the German-speaking Jewish immigrants from Central Europe who found success in Gold Rush-era San Francisco.

Photo: Unknown

Fleeing repression, Jewish immigrants found success in Gold Rush SF

1 / 3

Back to Gallery

Of all the groups that arrived in Gold Rush San Francisco, the Jews who fled a legacy of oppression in Europe may have experienced the most remarkable success.

In their Central European homelands, these German speakers had been confined to ghettos, prevented from marrying and barred from professional occupations. When they got to California, former peddlers, petty traders and craftsmen found a land where they were free to prosper — and in the years to come, they created some of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the state.

Many of the Jews who were to become merchant princes of San Francisco came from the same small region: Upper Franconia in German-speaking Bavaria. Indeed, several grew up in the same small town. Three men who would become business titans in San Francisco — William Haas, Isaias Wolf Hellman and Isaac Walter — were childhood friends who all came from the same rural town of Reckendorf, population 1,000. The most famous of them all, Levi Strauss, grew up in the town of Buttenheim, just 20 miles from Reckendorf.

The story of Haas, who built one of San Francisco’s most storied residences, the still-standing Haas-Lilienthal House on Franklin Street, is typical. Haas grew up in a society where the anti-Semitic bigotry that dated from the Middle Ages was still present. Bloody anti-Jewish riots had taken place as recently as 1819, and Jews were oppressed by punitive taxes and an infamous law called the Matrikel, which allowed only the oldest son in a Jewish family to marry.

More Portals of the Past

Starting in the 1840s, these repressive laws led to a wave of German Jewish immigration to the United States. No fewer than 200,000 German Jews would leave for what was known as the Golden Land.

The climate did improve — as Fred Rosenbaum writes in “Jewish Americans: Religion and Identity at 2007 Franklin Street,” the Matrikel and most other discriminatory laws were abolished in 1861. Like Hellman and Walter, Haas received a fine education at a Jewish primary school in Reckendorf, then an even better one at a secondary school in nearby Bamberg.

Haas arrived in San Francisco in 1868 and went to work for Haas Bros., the wholesale grocery company started by his older brother, Kalman, who had arrived in 1851. Like many other Jews during the Gold Rush, Kalman had realized that staying in San Francisco and opening a business — “mining the miners,” as the expression went — offered better prospects than heading to the gold fields.

William Haas started out as a clerk, then became a salesman, then a partner. His living conditions improved accordingly. When he arrived, he sometimes slept on a shelf in the store. Within two years, he bought a modest house worth $1,000. In 1886, he spent more than $18,000, not including the land, to build his ornate Victorian mansion on Franklin Street.

The Haas family was part of a new German-Jewish aristocracy, most from Bavaria, made up of several dozen families. This commercial elite, which emerged in San Francisco faster than anywhere else in the country, was filled with names that are still famous today — both because of their successful businesses and their philanthropic largesse.

Most of them made their fortune in dry goods or clothing. The most famous clothing kings were Levi Strauss and his brother-in-law, David Stern, whose company patented and manufactured the riveted pants that are today the most famous and best-selling line of clothing in the world. Other dry goods magnates included William Steinhart, Louis Sachs and Lazarus Dinkelspiel.

Simon Koshland ran a wool empire, and Louis Sloss and his brother-in-law Lewis Gerstle founded the Alaska Commercial Co., which controlled the market in salmon and seals. Aaron Fleishhacker made his pile in cardboard boxes, while Anthony Zellerbach made a fortune in paper. Bankers included Isaias Hellman and Philip Lilienthal.

Just as remarkable as the meteoric success of San Francisco’s Jews was the fact that they encountered very little anti-Semitism — far less than in New York and other U.S. cities. The reason was simple. San Francisco was a brand-new city, devoid of a status quo. There was no establishment to draw up ranks against perceived outsiders; everyone was an outsider.

In the frenzy of the Gold Rush, the ethnic, class and social distinctions that loomed large on the East Coast vanished. “All nations having come hither, shades of color, of belief, peculiarities of physique, of temper and habit were less distinctly marked,” historian Hubert Bancroft wrote in “California Inter Pocula.”

Bancroft also noted that the entire raison d’etre of the Gold Rush, the desire to get rich quick, undercut one of the traditional sources of anti-Semitism, the belief that Jews were grasping and greedy.

“Gold was here, and in common with the gentiles Jews loved gold,” he wrote. “Money was the humanizing bond. ... Christian and Jew loved money.”

The casual use of anti-Semitic tropes was acceptable and well-nigh universal in the United States at the time, but in San Francisco, such offensive attitudes seem to have been mostly rhetorical. Indeed, Jews were widely admired as upstanding citizens and leading businessmen.

In 1858, Steamer Day — the much-anticipated, carnival-like day when the Pacific Mail Steamer arrived with mail from the East Coast — was actually postponed by the city because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. It’s hard to imagine this taking place anywhere else in the country.

The next Portals will explore the manners and mores, and the city-changing philanthropy, of San Francisco’s Jewish elite.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com

Trivia time

Previous trivia question: Who happily strummed a guitar as he strolled down Haight Street on Aug. 7, 1967?

Answer: George Harrison.

This week’s trivia question: What percentage of San Franciscans voted for Donald Trump in the November presidential election?

Editor’s note

Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s OurSF.